Eat the Document is a documentary of Bob Dylan’s 1966
tour of the United Kingdom with the Hawks. It was shot under Dylan’s
direction by D. A. Pennebaker, whose groundbreaking documentary Dont Look Back [sic] chronicled Dylan’s 1965 British tour. The film was originally commissioned for the ABC television series Stage ’66.
Though shooting had completed for the film, Dylan’s July 1966
motorcycle accident delayed the editing process. Once well enough to
work again, Dylan edited the film himself. ABC rejected the film as
incomprehensible for a mainstream audience.
It has never been released on home video and prints are rarely screened in theaters. Some footage from Eat the Document was used in Martin Scorsese’s 2005 documentary on Bob Dylan, No Direction Home.
Hofstadter in Bologna, Italy, in March 2002 by Maurizio Codogno
Douglas Hofstadter wrote a popular book in 1979 called Gödel, Escher, Bach to celebrate the work and ideas of Gödel, along with those of artist M. C. Escher and composer Johann Sebastian Bach. The book partly explores the ramifications of the fact that Gödel's incompleteness theorem can be applied to any Turing-complete computational system, which may include the human brain.
"Escher, Metamorphosis II" - Source: Official M.C. Escher website..
Waterfall - M.C. Escher
Douglas R. Hofstadter on M. C. Escher’s drawings
To my mind, the most beautiful and powerful visual realizations of this notion of Strange Loops exist in the work of the Dutch graphic artist M. C. Escher, who lived from 1902 to 1972. Escher was the creator of some of the most intellectually stimulating drawings of all time. Many of them have their origin in paradox, illusion, or double=meaning.
Mathematicians were among the first admirers of Escher’s drawings, and this is understandable because they often are based on mathematical principles of symmetry or pattern… But there is much more to a typical Escher drawing than just symmetry or pattern; there is often an underlying idea, realized in artistic form. And in particular, the Strange Loop is one of the most recurrent themes in Escher’s work. Look, for example, at the lithograph Waterfall, 1961, and compare its six-step endlessly falling loop with the six-step endlessly rising loop of the J. S. Bach's "Canon per Tonos". The similarity of vision is remarkable. Bach and Escher are playing one single theme in two different “keys”: music and art.
Implicit in the concept of Strange Loops is the concept of infinity, since what else is a loop but a way of representing an endless process in a finite way? And infinity plays a large role in many of Escher’s drawings. Copies of one single theme often fit into each’ other, forming visual analogues to the canons of Bach. Several such patterns can be seen in Escher’s famous print Metamorphosis. It is a little like the “Endlessly Rising Canon”: wandering further and further from its starting point, it suddenly is back. In the tiled planes of Metamorphosis and other pictures, there are already suggestions of infinity.
